Richard Kearney's Anatheistic Wager: Philosophy, Theology, Poetics

This anthology of fifteen essays provides a variety of critical perspectives on the influential ideas in Richard Kearney’s Anatheism.

Blaise Pascal famously insisted that it was better to wager belief in God than to risk eternal damnation. More recently, the distinguished philosopher Richard Kearney has offered a wager of his own—the anatheistic wager, or return to God after the death of God. In this volume, an international group of contributors consider what Kearney’s spiritual wager means.

This volume examines what is at stake with such a wager and what anatheism demands of the self and of others. The essays explore the dynamics of religious anatheistic performativity, its demarcations and limits, and its motives.

A recent interview with Kearney focuses on crucial questions about philosophy, theology, and religious commitment. As a whole, this volume interprets and challenges Kearney’s philosophy of religion and its radical impact on contemporary views of God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9780253034038

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Introduction: The Risk of the Wager

Chris Doude van Troostwijk and Matthew Clemente

I

The notion of faith necessarily implies risk. Faith entails the possibility of the loss of faith. It entails the possibility of faithlessness. A faith that is comfortable, that is not threatened by insecurity and instability, that does not grapple with doubt, is no faith at all. It is evidence, science, gnosis, or the system. Perhaps it is blindness. And though all of these ways of relating to the world can be subjected to the same type of skepticism and critique as faith itself, none is faith. No, with faith, there is something different at stake. Something at once awesome and awful. Something primary, foundational, fundamental. Something that can only be authentically approached in fear and trembling.

For a person of faith, the risk of the loss of faith is ever-present. It is an inherent part of faith itself. However, one does not lose one’s faith as one loses a conviction. Convictional belief is an expression of faith. It is an expression of an existential, prereflexive disposition that comes from within. It echoes a radical, archaic, primal experience—the experience of the question of faith. And if this experience is always already precarious, if it is never secure, never stable, always uncertain, then the question of faith necessarily implies two possible answers and the primordial experience provides two viable responses. Faith and faithlessness are equally valid options. Belief and unbelief are their respective articulations. Both attempt to provide an answer to an original call. Both attempt to express the radical, foundational moment of human experience—a moment both primary and unending, a moment at the heart of the human condition itself.

Throughout his corpus, Richard Kearney has attempted to examine this very experience. Making use of both philosophical and theological approaches to the question of faith—methodologically, he operates within the French hermeneutic tradition of Ricoeur, the continental phenomenological school of Levinas and Merleau-Ponty, and the poststructuralist deconstructionist tradition of Derrida and Caputo—Kearney offers poignant reflections with the sense of urgency that his subject demands. In his work over the last decade—most notably, Anatheism: Returning to God After God (2010) but elsewhere as well—Kearney has put forth the proposition that faith is a wager. Faith, he claims, is a response to a question posed to us, even forced upon us, by those limit experiences that make religious and poetic discourse possible.

The debt that this development in Kearney’s thinking owes to other philosophers of the wager—Pascal, Kierkegaard, and James come readily to mind—is clear. Yet as this volume will show, Kearney offers us a wager all his own—one that demands serious attention, engagement, and critique. Along these lines, one question that we, the editors, have grappled with time and again as we have delved deeper into Kearney’s work is, what is at stake in Richard Kearney’s anatheistic wager? What can be lost and what is there to gain?

II

In the well-known formulation of his theistic wager, Pascal emphasizes the fact that the stakes are high. Choosing rightly has the potential to save one from the grips of death, destruction, and despair. Choosing wrongly might very well lead to an eternity spent in hell. Bliss, torment, or nonexistence—these are the possible outcomes with which man is presented. And for that reason, Pascal insists, one ought to wager belief in God. God is the only one who can save us from damnation and the void.

Like Pascal, Kierkegaard presents us with a wager that entails real risk and real consequence. He proposes a double existential wager which forces the question of faith onto the individual. After all, according to his Lutheran tradition, the individual alone is responsible before God. To become a Christian, Kierkegaard insists, one must first become oneself. But how can one do this? At first, one wagers between the life of the aesthetic and the ethical life. Neither option, however, leads to a life lived authentically. The first wager fails; it ends in despair. The individual is condemned to an inauthentic existence. Thus, it is only by the introduction of a second, paradoxical, impossible wager—the wager of faith—that the individual can be saved. But from our finite human perspective, this wager is absurd. It is, as Kearney might say, an impossible possibility. Metaphysical calculation provides no answer to this existential wager. One must leap into the anxiety and terror of the absurd.

Yet the risk inherent in wagering is not limited to a specific set of confessional beliefs. The pragmatic wager of William James, for instance, is also dependent on one’s willingness to set aside absolute certainly and make a dangerous leap. William Kingdon Clifford’s quasi-positivist credo that it is wrong, always, everywhere, for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence was famously refuted by James who, in his refuting, offered perhaps the first pragmatist justification of religious belief. He claimed that sometimes, and especially when the stakes are high, one is permitted or even obliged to adhere to a faith that is based on insufficient evidence. Some decisions simply cannot be based on purely logical or scientific grounds. Some rely on passions and existential aspirations. At times, it would be a prudential failure not to believe. For instance, when one declares one’s love to another, one must take the risk and trust, without knowing, that the other will respond in kind. Love cannot be proved; it can only be trusted. Love demands faith.

And so it is with these risks and wagers in mind that we ought to address Richard Kearney’s anatheistic wager. In place of the reductive, simplistic dichotomy set up between dogmatic theism and militant atheism, anatheism opens the possibility of addressing theological questions in a nondoctrinal way. It does not try to overcome the uncomfortable experience of the in-between. It does not try to escape the either-or dilemma. Rather, anatheism proposes a faith haunted by the risk of faithlessness, and vice versa. The anatheistic wager is a constant not-knowing. It is a cloud of unknowing—a problem posed to us by those limit experiences that confront us and demand of us a response. Therefore, it is not simply a metaphysics of probability and calculation, à la Pascal. Nor is it a risk that prompts an existential leap or pragmatic prudence. It appears at birth, is present throughout life, and disappears only with death.

The goal of this work, then, is to raise the question: what kind of risks or uncertainties are at stake in Richard Kearney’s anatheistic wager? If the wager is ever-present, if it confronts us and demands of us a constant wagering, a constant choice, if we are always being asked to decide between hospitality and hostility, the open hand and the closed fist, and if this decision cannot be gotten rid of, cannot be overcome—why then choose one and not the other? Why faith and not faithlessness? Why God and not the void?

III

The anatheistic wager confronts us with a fundamental paradox. If the wager is inescapable, how then can we apply to it the concept of a wager? For, as Kearney himself readily admits, the anatheistic wager is deeper and more originary than the wagers detailed above. It has about it a kind of quasi-ontological status. If, in the confrontation with the other, not-choosing is already a kind of choosing, if not-choosing is not a real possibility, if I cannot not choose—then the wager is prior to any sort of binary optionality. It is no longer an issue of to be or not to be—to be with God or to be without God—but, as Lacan rewrote Hamlet’s famous exclamation: "to be or not, to be is the question." Being itself is a question and is questioning. And before we can calculate or leap or make any kind of practical consideration, the wager is always already there—wagering in and through us. As long as we live, the wager will be there. It cannot be gotten rid of.

This anatheistic wager is both an archi-onto-logical tension and an individual or collective decision. It exists before any choice, and yet it finds its expression in a variety of choices, answers, and engagements. The authors in this volume attempt to illustrate how this original, quasi- or proto-ontological anatheistic wager becomes manifest in thought, belief, and art. This text, therefore, follows Kearney’s own hermeneutic example by considering the implications his work has on the spheres of philosophy, theology, and poetics. The collected articles are arranged according to the method of their exposition: dialogue in Part I, commentary and critique in parts II and III. The section called Conversations After God examines how anatheism problematizes and transforms the classical dichotomy between faith and faithlessness into dialectics of wagering. The articles in At the Limits of Theology explore the consequences of anatheistic wagering for the philosophy of religion and theological discourse. And Poetics of the Sacred reveals how the inescapability of the anatheistic wager makes it a never-ending story. From the anatheistic wager a straight line must be drawn to anatheistic theopoetics. Thus the wager continues in and through art—and above all: the art of living.

CHRIS DOUDE VAN TROOSTWIJK is a Dutch philosopher and theologian. He is Professor of philosophy and ethics at the Luxembourg School of Religion & Society and works as an affiliated researcher and lecturer at the Protestant Theological Faculty of the University of Strasbourg (France). He holds the Mennonite Chair for Liberal Theology at the Free University in Amsterdam (The Netherlands). His current research project Philosophies, Theologies and Ethics of Finance is concerned with providing a phenomenological hermeneutics of money.

MATTHEW CLEMENTE is a husband and father of two. He is a Teaching Fellow at Boston College specializing in philosophy of religion and contemporary Continental thought. He is the author of Out of the Storm: A Novella (2016) and is the coeditor of The Art of Anatheism (2018) and (mis)Reading Nietzsche (2018).

PART I: CONVERSATIONS AFTER GOD

1Theism, Atheism, Anatheism

James Wood and Richard Kearney

I

JW: I’d like to ask you about the personal nature of your relationship to God—your own religious path.

RK: Sure. I’ll tell you a story about something I did on Irish radio. It’s a program called Miriam Meets that’s on every Sunday. Usually two members of a family are invited. So I did it with my brother, Tim, who works with the Communauté de l’Arche, founded by Jean Vanier. Vanier is a very committed Christian who works with disabled people—kind of a hero and a saint. I played the bad guy and my brother, Tim, was the good guy. We get along extremely well, but we were teasing each other and so on. He was being pitched as the theist and me [sic] as the more wayward one—in other words, the anatheist. A week later, I was walking in the fields near our house in West Cork, and I came to the top of this hill. I was trespassing on a farmer’s land, and he drove up with his tractor and hopped out, and I thought, Oh dear, he’s going to get me for trespassing and disturbing his cattle. But he just wanted to talk about God. Are you the atheist? he asks right away. So I said, What do you mean? And he said, I heard you on the radio. Your brother—he was very good, but you were very confused. In Ireland, an anatheist is an atheist—and atheists are very confused.

JW: Is there a tension between the openness, the emptiness of the name, God—God as the name for the more, the surplus, the surprise, that humans seek—between that emptying out and the need to keep on talking of God? In his book Saving God: Religion after Idolatry, the Princeton philosopher Mark Johnston says, in effect, Let’s stop using the word ‘God.’ I will call him ‘the Highest One’ from now on—which is good, proper anti-idolatry, but nevertheless he’s managed to write an entire book about this indescribable Highest One. So if there are all sorts of words that we have to retire because language is too absolute to adequately represent this unfinished, unfinalizable, God, then from a nonbeliever’s point of view, a question quickly emerges: Well, why not just retire God himself? You’ve retired most of the language; why not retire the concept itself and just stop talking about God, the Highest One, and all the rest of it? Which is another way of asking, Why does Kearney need God in order to achieve his ethics?

RK: I’m sympathetic at one level—doing away with the word God and eventually doing away with the terms theism and atheism. Anatheism is just a term for the critical revisiting of that language in order to try and upset it, challenging the old dogmatic antithesis between theism and atheism. Anatheism is no more than a strategic, terminological tool to carve open a middle space that is, as the prefix ana- suggests, both before and after the theism/atheism divide. In a way, its unfamiliarity as a neologism serves initially to confound readers’ expectations—some people think it’s theism, others atheism (an-atheism, as it sometimes mispronounced), and others again something altogether different. It depends how you read it. But at the outset, confronted with the term, no one is meant to be entirely sure—perhaps not even me. And the fact that it also means back and forward interests me. The ana is not readily locatable in either time or space. It is a special moment, a strange space that I do not hesitate to call sacred. So I’m using this odd prefix, ana-, to try to trouble the old dichotomy of God versus anti-God, and to do this in favor of a middle realm, a milieu, where some new kind of thinking about this ageless yet still urgent question might occur. Such a middle space is not some wishy-washy, lukewarm ambivalence—which one would be correct to spit out as Scripture suggests. It is not facile syncretism—a little bit of this and that without ever committing yourself to anything at all. The doubleness of ana is not duplicity, but rather a deeply productive tension. The idea of ana with its double a can be read in two ways: as in the colloquial a-dieu, it can mean both hello and good-bye. One connotes a moving away from or a departure, the a of the deus absconditus—or, more radically, atheism (mystical or secular). While the other a is the adieu of hello—ad deum. Excuse the Latin, but one finds echoes of this in the colloquial usage of French and English also. And for me this double a says something important about our contemporary relationship with the sacred.

JW: Why keep the word sacred?

RK: I use the word sacred because it is generous—or, at least, more capacious than the often-exclusivist understanding of terms like theism, religion, and God. Many people who might have a real problem with the traditional notions of God have little trouble saying This is sacred to me when referring to a certain person, place, or time. So the initial a of ana signals a first movement of abstention and absolution whereby one absolves oneself of the preconceptions of the old God of power and might, in a sort of apophatic (negative theology) or anti-idolatrous (iconoclasm) gesture. And this preliminary move, akin if not identical with a certain salutary atheist scruple, may then open the possibility—never the necessity—of a return to something more, other, transcendent: a surplus that was always there though we didn’t see it. This is what I call ana-theos, or the God after God. Something called God—for God is a name that means different things to different people. The best response, at least for me, to the question do you believe in God? is, It depends what you mean by God. In other words, Tell me what you understand about God, and I’ll tell you whether I believe it.

JW: So, tell me something about what God means to you. Tell me something about your own childhood in religious terms. Your father was a sort of observant Catholic, wasn’t he?

RK: Yes, he was. Silently observant. He never came to mass with us.

JW: Oh, he didn’t?

RK: No. He went often to his own mass. He was a silent observer and rarely took the Eucharist. He felt unworthy and would go on a penitential pilgrimage to Lough Derg in Northern Ireland once a year; only then would he take communion. Whereas my mother was very devotional and very partial to the sacraments. So to put it in terms he would never have used himself, my father was more apophatic—he rarely spoke about religion and never about theology. He was educated and intelligent—a professor of surgery—but never articulated his religious or spiritual beliefs. In fact, at his funeral, a medical nun from one of the Cork hospitals came up to me and said, You know, every day we saw your father at the back of the chapel. He never went into surgery without saying a prayer. But it was like a revelation to us. We would never have imagined it.

JW: He went on his own?

RK: Yes.

JW: Interesting.

RK: By contrast, my mother was full of spiritual pathos and very involved with helping suffering and homeless people in the city. Both parents were incredibly tolerant—moral but never moralistic or moralising. My mother would say, Just be good to people. To take a somewhat dramatic example, when contraception was outlawed in Ireland, she would encourage all six of her sons to bring condoms when we dated girls. She knew that boys would be boys and wanted us to be responsible and never cause our girlfriends any harm. My sister became pregnant when she was still in her teens and suffered the consequences of a punishing Catholic community. But my father and mother stood by her and her baby, right through the terrible ordeal when she had to give up her studies and lost her first job as a trainee teacher in a girls’ school for fear of scandal. My parents were amazingly strong and protective. I respected that and learned early on that religious people could be the best as well as the worst.

JW: So your mother was a churchgoer and took you along?

RK: She took all seven of her children. My brothers and I were altar boys. We went through the whole thing, and it was very beautiful. Sacramental, richly liturgical, something magical, not at all censorious or punishing. It may have been somewhat atypical of most Irish Catholic culture of the time; I don’t know. But when I later heard and read about what so many of my contemporaries lived through as young Catholics—a punitive, fear-filled, guilt-ridden religion—I felt fortunate to have had the parents I did.

JW: The punitive element, that wasn’t there at all for you?

RK: For the most part, no. I was, of course, beaten by the Christian brothers in primary school—nobody escaped that—but fortunately, my parents sent me to secondary school in a Benedictine Abbey called Glenstal. The monks there had a deep culture of tolerance, an openness to interreligious dialogue inspired by pioneering Benedictine missionaries like Abhishiktananda and Bede Griffiths in India; and a real sense of critical questioning informed by Vatican II theologians like Yves Congar and Henri De Lubac. Glenstal Abbey was also a place of ecumenical reconciliation in a sectarian Ireland, where the Northern troubles smouldered and raged in the late sixties and seventies.

JW: As a teenager, did you struggle with inherited belief or was the inherited belief not a large enough pressure that you had to struggle with it?

RK: It was a mixture of inheritance and struggle. Glenstal Abbey, where I went when I was twelve, provided a forum for this that was not, as I mentioned, very typical of Ireland in the late sixties. And then there was my equally atypical family situation—with a very apophatic father and a very cataphatic mother. And, of course, my mother’s devotion to the poor and needy—we’d pray for them and for my father’s critically ill patients every night before bed. It was basically my mother who shared my father’s work with us. He never said a word about it himself. And then three of my brothers started working with the disabled community as teenagers—they were much better than me in that regard. I was reading Nietzsche and Heidegger while they were pushing wheelchairs in Lourdes and Knock. They were very inspired by Jean Vanier’s movement L’arche, which was set up to care for the mentally disabled by taking them out of awful psychiatric hospitals, known as looney bins in Cork, and living with them in ordinary houses. Vanier, originally a philosophy professor in Canada and a good friend of the family, was extremely liberal, open, ecumenical, wise, and caring. So I saw all the good side of Catholic caritas and caring for the broken and wounded—along with the more oppressive side infamously epitomised by some perverted clergy in Ireland, as elsewhere, and in much of the Catholic-imposed social intolerance (regarding divorce, homosexuality, premarital sex, unmarried mothers, contraception, abortion, and so on). So, although I remained informed by a spiritually rich religious life on a personal level with my own family and educational experience, at a public level, I was extremely angry with the official Church. But my antiecclesiastical indignation did not prevent me from struggling to retrieve what I considered to be certain valuable—perhaps invaluable—treasures of my spiritual heritage. I felt I could be furious with the bishops while continuing to worship something called God.

JW: You weren’t struggling through theodicy questions?

RK: Of course, but not for long. Theodicy never made sense to me. I was incensed by the very idea from early on. I could never believe in a divinity that willed or allowed evil if it had the power to do otherwise. That seemed like sheer cruelty or casuistry. I never gave credence to a deity of omnipotence. My God was one of nonsovereignty, vulnerability, fragility, and unknowability. A God of service, who preferred washing feet, healing the sick, giving bread, dying for his friends and enemies alike. In fact, the washing of the disciples’ feet was always my favorite Easter liturgy. Jean Vanier used to do that. He’d go around and wash the feet of those—both abled and disabled—at his Easter table. That to me epitomised the divine as a servant—not servile, but in the service of others, strangers, outcasts. So, when you mention Mark Johnson defining the monotheistic God as the Highest One, I would rather say the lowest one. My God is an anti-God in that sense, God as outsider, guest, vagrant, the one who hungers and thirsts for justice—the least of these, as he says in the gospels, the elachistos. Not the God above us but, as Paul Claudel put it, the God beneath us.¹

JW: Now, what if an ethically, politically engaged atheist had turned up alongside you while you were doing those good, Vanier-inspired works? And this ethical chap was as ethical and motivated as you but turned out to have a Dawkins-like lack of belief. Where, then, do the distinctions fall? What would separate you, if anything, from him? What would be the difference?

RK: Well, the first thing for me would be what doesn’t separate us—the fact that we’re both in service to something radically other than ourselves. If you look at Matthew 25 . . .

JW: It is a foundational text for you, isn’t it?

RK: Yes. Matt 25:31–44 is radical. But its radicality is so often neglected in practical and theological terms. It’s crucial. Christ identifies here with the hospes, the stranger in the street, the last person in the world you think could be God. And that is where and how the kingdom comes—incarnate in the one who gives or receives a cup of water. I mean, that is the exclusion of exclusion par excellence. So if the worst of religion is its exclusiveness—we have the revealed truth and the rest of you are damned—the great thing about this passage (and I believe one finds certain equivalents in Judaism, Buddhism, and other religions) is that no one need be excluded, except those who exclude themselves by choosing not to give or receive bread. Atheists are not at all excluded here—but I will come back to this. In fact, the asking—acknowledging one’s need for bread and water—is as important as giving the bread and water (or wine, as the case may be). So anatheist practice, as I understand it, would be the exclusion of exclusion, not the contrary. Or, to put it in more technical terms, when it comes to serving strangers, orthopraxis trumps orthodoxy.

JW: I see.

II

RK: But let’s get back to your example of the nonbelieving student who is doing the same thing as the believing student. What is the difference? When I’m washing people’s feet with this guy as we’re working together with the homeless in downtown Dublin or out in Somalia, the first and most important thing is that we’re doing the work (facere veritatem as Augustine says, "do the truth); the second thing might be that, as we are working, we have a conversation. And the conversation begins with the questions, What do you say that you’re doing? And why are you doing it? What is your narrative about this shared action?" In short, what is the story behind your being here? Or the history behind the story? The why, who, wherefrom, whereto? I recount my story and listen to the other’s story as well.

JW: You trade narratives.

RK: Yes. We trade narratives, and then we ask questions about those narratives: The atheist might say, Why do you call that God? And the anatheist would say, Well, actually, I call it the suffering servant. And the reply might be, But that’s not my view of God. And then I could tell the story, as I understand it, of Abraham and Sarah feeding the hungry strangers under the Mamre tree and of Isaiah as the suffering servant and Christ’s washing of the feet at the Last Supper (perhaps using the more unusual term the Nazarene rather than Jesus or Messiah) and the feeding of the hungry with loaves and fishes and the healing of lepers (the one who came back to give thanks was an outsider, a Samaritan) and the later testimonies of Francis and Claire, and Teresa and John of the Cross, and Etty Hillesum and Vanier and so forth. I would explain that these are some key stories from my own Abrahamic Christian tradition, but that one could find analogous (though not identical) stories in other spiritual or religious traditions—some of them occasionally called atheist, like Buddhism. I would express my belief in the radical ethos of hospitality to the outsider, the excluded, and the estranged as being central to my notion of the name or metaphor God, which, for me—as an anatheist—radically includes atheists equally committed to love and justice for the stranger. And having said all that (or preferably a fraction of it), I would simply stop and listen to what the atheist had to say. I would be totally open to the fact that his or her story might be just as convincing and moving than mine, if not more so, or that our stories might overlap in some interesting and surprising ways, producing a more open theism and atheism—that is, novel variations of the anatheist option.

JW: So, for you, it comes back to narratives in the end?

RK: Yes. But in the case of religion—religious narratives are literary narratives but not just literary narratives—this does not have to mean illusion, fiction, untruth, or flight of fancy (as Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche said). It can also mean testimony—a witnessing to the truth: you shall know them by the fruit (Matthew 7:20), the fruit of their actions as recounted through stories and histories. And these fruits of faith might be called second actions that are inspired by the sacred stories initially inspired by first actions. It is a hermeneutic circle, as Paul Ricoeur puts it—prefiguring actions of sacred figures configured as oral and written narratives that can then be refigured by believers of those narratives. In other words, you begin with a sacred life or history that calls for a story that configures that holy act (hospitality, love, pardon, and revolution) and that, when read or heard by others, gives rise to another sacred act that reprises and re-enacts the story. And so on, ad infinitum. I think that is what the infinite means—the call of the good constantly reinscribing itself in finite acts of history and stories without end. Christianity for me is that tradition of transmission through the lives of the saints, beginning with those who visit the empty tomb or share bread in Emmaus and then down through the lives of ordinary Samaritans and saints in the lower case as well as the upper case—like St. Francis and Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King. And this is still going on every day where guests and strangers exchange actions and words of compassion. Hannah Arendt says that if someone asks you who you are, you tell your story.² If someone asks me why I believe, I do just that. I tell my story.

JW: Yes, it seems tremendously important. I find that whenever I write about theological issues, I’m almost forced to admit some element of myself.

RK: As in your novel, The Book against God—that is quite autobiographical isn’t it?

JW: Well, yes and no. I had a pretty strange upbringing religiously. My parents are Anglicans, and I grew up in the north of England, in Durham. But in the 1970s, when I was about twelve, the church we worshipped at underwent charismatic renewal. My parents fell quite hard for this Anglicised American evangelicalism (because that’s what it was, really), despite the fact that my father was a scientist—he taught zoology at Durham University. I spent my late teenage years struggling pretty hard with my parents’ evangelical Christianity, and in some ways my very concept of Christianity—even as I reject religious belief—is ultimately an evangelical one (which is a kind of tribute to my parents, I guess). In fact, when I wrote The Book against God, which is about an atheist who has religious parents, I tried hard to make those fictional parents very different from my own—I gave them a very easy-going, tolerant, undogmatic, centrist kind of Anglicanism, which is quite far from the evangelical form of belief. I did this because I wanted to get a true novelistic narrative going and not merely produce memoir. But if I didn’t quite portray my parents in that novel, I certainly portrayed their world.

RK: The circle of narrative-testimony-praxis is the crux for me—the heart of the whole thing. Theory comes after (though it is not unimportant). So, to repeat, I would begin by saying where I am coming from and then listen to where the other is coming from. And what interests me is to learn of the journey that brings my interlocutor to say, No, I cannot call that God, or Gosh, I never thought of that before. I thought of God as the almighty one, not the three strangers coming out of the desert or the hungry, thirsting outcast on the wayside or the Shulammite woman lusting for her lover in the streets at night, asking to be kissed with the kisses of his mouth (as in the Song of Songs), or a voice crying in the wilderness. So we would listen to each other and hopefully learn from each other. I would hopefully learn more about atheism and so deepen my anatheism. In the final analysis, such dialogue comes down to the question, What is God? And I very much enjoy Joyce’s answer to that in Ulysses: A cry in the street.³ For me, Ulysses is a holy book, ending with a cry in the street and a cry in the bedroom—a woman crying out yes, as Mary did in Nazareth. And several works by Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Blake, Fanny Howe, and other poets are sacred texts too. But that is another story.

JW: In that exchange, would you consider yourself engaged in some process of anatheistic conversion? I wouldn’t like to use that word, but you know what I mean.

RK: I wouldn’t use the term conversion either—I dislike the idea, as I do anything that smacks of evangelism or apologetics. I would hate to think I am trying to convert you now. God forbid. But I would say that in any meaningful exchange of narratives on religion, there might be some kind of mutual transformation. I distrust the current academic fashion of so-called neutrality. As if questions of God could be conducted without any concern for personal and existential issues of faith or truth. In the beginning is hermeneutics. We all have our presuppositions and wagers. If we were to put things in theist or atheist terms—I am actually becoming less and less satisfied with these tags—I would say that in the anatheist space of mutual exchange and question, the relation between service and faith, between the divine and human goodness, between God and the stranger, I would say that in the space of reciprocal opening to each other, one of us might describe himself as an anatheist theist (me, for instance) and another as an anatheist atheist (you, for instance?). That is more or less how I would see my relationship with you in the anatheist discussion we are having right now. When I read Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx as a young student, for example, my understanding of theism was deeply transformed in good ways. Though for obvious reasons, the relationship with those atheist interlocutors was not mutual (alas, they were dead). In my dialogues with you—now and on previous occasions, and in reading your writings on literature and belief in The Broken Estate or in your novel—these intellectual encounters are challenging and opening up my thinking about religion, God, and spirituality. I would also add that it is largely in my recent exchanges with you—and also in my exchanges with Buddhist thinkers—that my dissatisfaction with the very terminology of theism/atheism has become more pronounced. But theism and atheism are the terms we have to deal with, at least in the West where the monotheist/pantheist/antitheist debates have raged—sometimes with very violent results. As Heidegger said, we have to use the language of metaphysics to get beyond metaphysics. I have to use the language of Christian onto-theology to get beyond the limits of onto-theology. It is in this sense that ana is, for me, an alternative to the theist versus atheist polarities, the us versus them exclusivism. For me, Christ, genuinely understood, is the exclusion of exclusion. But there are many Christs before and after Christ. As he himself said in that wonderfully self-multiplying kenotic way of his, before Abraham was I am (John 8:58) and I must go so that the Paraclete can come (John 16:7).

III

JW: So, where would you place yourself on the Christian spectrum?

RK: I must confess that I even find the identifications of Christian and non-Christian very limiting at times, especially as one progresses in genuine interreligious dialogue with others. I would say that I am post-Christian in the sense of ana-Christian, by which I mean that I go beyond certain aspects of my Christian church and heritage while also going back to it after I have left it. Having abandoned my childhood faith, I keep revisiting, retrieving, and reviving what I find there as an inexhaustible remainder—the surplus, the gift, the